Wednesday 5 June 2013

New activity using Mac OS X

Here's a couple of ways that you can use apps on OS X to do useful new things.

Filling in a form on a PDF file.

1 Launch the Preview app. Then chose the menu View > Customize Tool Bar. Make sure that the icon "Edit" is in the tool bar, if its not drag it in. (Suggested tool bar should contain View, Zoom to Fit, Edit, Expanding Space, Slide Show). Click Done.

2 Open your form in Preview. If it is a JPEG then export it as a PDF, re-open the PDF.

3 Click on the "Edit" icon

4 Chose the "An" box icon ("An" stands for Annotate in case you wondered)

5 and show the fonts, Tools > Show Fonts

6 Set your font Courrier, and the font size to suit the form, especially if entries are going in boxes on the form, so that they fit character by character or character-space-character. 11.5 pt seems suitable often

7 Draw box around the space to fill on form you want to fill in

8 Enter text or numbers, in the suitable format as in 6. Check the positioning is accurate, if not move the box, or change font size as needed.

9 Save the new PDF with a new name (Press Alt and chose File > Save As…)

Screen movie recording with sound

The Quicktime app can capture an area of the screen into a movie. This is the easy part, getting it to capture also the system sound output requires more effort, and more software. Sound input source and output destination can be selected under the sound panel of System Preferences, and can be accessed also by a trick of holding down the "Alt" key while clicking on the menu bar loudspeaker icon. But how do you get the output to go to the input of another application rather than from the microphone and to the loudspeaker?

By using a nifty software called Soundflower. This creates an audio unit with 2 or 16 channel inputs and outputs. You can then chose to direct the system output - from the movie on screen that you want to capture, to Soundflower and chose to have the sound input of Quicktime from Soundflower. So the set up is now easy:

1 Alt click on menu bar sound icon

2 Chose Output Device Soundflower 2ch

3 Start Quicktime

4 Chose File > New Screen Recording

5 Click on small triangle at right side

6 Chose In from Soundflower 2ch

7 Find movie (e.g. You Tube) to record

8 Push Start red button, hold mouse down and draw box over screen area to record

9 Start recording, then start movie

10 Push square box to stop

11 Chose Edit > Trim and slide to start and end required

12 File > Export as "mov" file

and there you are a perfect capture of any part of the screen into a movie file with sound.

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